Opinions of 10mb (L) Product

Hi All

Im looking at getting the 10mb (L) package and just wondered what peoples opinion of it is ..i.e for streaming and download during managed periods and also speeds in the unmanaged periods for torrents overnight?

Thanks

Edited by deleted (Mon 05-Jul-10 20:08:20)

Reliability
Virgin Cable VS ADSL is amazing! i've had it for over a year in Birmingham and I have not had to call Cust Service once! Always works!
Same with my current connection in Leicester

Speed
Now this depends on your area in Bham I would always get 9.97mb no matter what time.
In leicester right now I've done a speedtest and its showing around 2.5mb and I have not used the connection much today...so it really depends on your area.
Torrents are usually perfect
Streaming - do seem to get the odd issue but could be my browser.
Catchuptv and Bbc iplayer always seem to work great off peak/peak

Conclusion
Would I recommend it? 100% its the best broadband connection I've ever had....and from what i've heard they are upgrading the upstream speed for all users...

u can't use torrent as there is 3 strike warning and disconnection you if you are downloading illegal p2p.

There is no upstream upgrading for 10Mb, only on the 50Mb !

Edited by adslmax (Tue 06-Jul-10 14:59:56)

In reply to a post by adslmax:

u can't use torrent as there is 3 strike warning and disconnection you if you are downloading illegal p2p.

Can you point to that in the VM T&C please? Are you sure you aren't getting confused by the new law which will apply to all ISP's

In reply to a post by adslmax:

There is no upstream upgrading for 10Mb, only on the 50Mb !

All products are going to be upstream 10% of downstream so 1Mbps on the 10Mbps product sometime (probably this year).

In reply to a post by adslmax:

u can't use torrent as there is 3 strike warning and disconnection you if you are downloading illegal p2p.

There is no upstream upgrading for 10Mb, only on the 50Mb !

lol i find it ironic that beside your tbb screen name there is the caption (fountain of knowledge)

My experience is that VM are ok, but definitely not great.

They have messed up every single bill I've had, for the 1st 3 months they added £5 to my bill rather than minusing it, then as compensaion they gave a £20 credit, but added this to the bill rather than minusing it. Then they applied a £20 credit to the bill they had already added £20 to so in effect no credit, eventually got sorted. BUT this bill was £20 too much, oh dear.

The speeds and reliability is hit and miss for myself, 50% of the time I would say I get 10 meg. Other times it's less than a meg. During certain times the pings go as high as 4000 ms and there's high packetloss.

But generally if you download during late night you get 10 meg

It massively depends on where you live as my area is oversubscribed and VM have said there are issues with speed where I am.

My only issue is that when traffic management occurs I can't stream what-so-ever, I get 2.5 meg but for some reason it still buffers and buffers.

But it could be worse ... E.g. slow every evening guaranteed, all torrents + p2p throttled, etc..

On the whole I think there are other better ISPs but if you're in an uncongested area it would be great. If your areas suffering due to high demand like mine go elsewhere.

My most recent experiences of cable are with ntl and Telewest, nothing since VM bought it, and in those days the connection speeds were 1Mbps and 2Mbps.

Cable generally just works. I could count on the fingers of one hand how many periods of downtime there were in many years. It doesn't pack up for two weeks while morons at the exchange fiddle with deploying "max" technologies to try and get some ancient bell wire to deliver something faintly usable.

The delivered speed used to be the advertised speed e.g. a 2Mbps connection delivered 2Mbps actual. With the increase to 10Mbps came the dreaded "up to" (well done, ASA) but even that said, IIRC the average 10Mbps delivered speed is 8.1Mbps to 8.7Mbps.

None of this "the knackered old piece of copper and aliminium wire that's been hanging over your street for the last 50 years is too long to manage more than a meg" nonsense.

If it does go wrong, at least it's all in house. No ISP arguing with you to argue with the line supplier to argue with Openreach rubbish, or the ISP being reluctant to do anything in case they get a bill for patching up part of the shoddy phone network which needed doing anyway.

From what I read most cable issues are down to installation and incorrect power level adjustments (someone actually comes to your house, plugs it in and tests it before leaving rather than with phones where a pair of bare wires hanging out of the wall can constitute a finished installation 'cos it looks OK at the exchange end)

I think the 50Mbps service has a dedicated support line/higher QOS.

Basically, cable doesn't have any competition.

In reply to a post by adslmax:

u can't use torrent as there is 3 strike warning and disconnection you if you are downloading illegal p2p.

There is no upstream upgrading for 10Mb, only on the 50Mb !

The 3 strikes applies to uploading, not downloading. It applies to any Internet connection from the major ISPs, assuming that the Digital Economy Act doesn't get repealed.

10Mb is getting an upgrade as you were informed earlier. Per that comment all tiers are going to 10:1 so it's getting its' upstream doubled to 1Mbit.

Shoo.

Edited by deleted (Tue 06-Jul-10 18:58:40)

I love to slag off VM (well, 'love' is the wrong word, I just do it as it's necessary!)
This is due to their organisational issues and refusing to invest in more capacity in my area (so their traffic management is a big fail/fail scenario if it doesn't prevent congestion). Also the pathetic upstream speeds, which upgrading to 1Mb later this year is well behind the curve.

@ j112 - if you say VM's service is location-dependent and even your second connection is dodgy, it makes you sound non-credible indeed if you then would recommend them "100%". It doesn't sound like they have 100% performance and you can't blame the phone line and BT like you can with ADSL.

@ ukhardy07 - you put it in a much more considered way. The reason that when the traffic management kicks in and you find that you no longer have a workable broadband connection is simply down to shifting your connection onto a really rubbish router/network - specially dedicated to handling traffic-managed connections in that area. At least, that's the theory. I seem to remember poor tracerts, speedtests, pingtests AND the aforementioned lack of streaming capability pointing to something like that.

VM aren't desperate to tell you useful things as how their network performs when you ring them up. Or sometimes they will tell you useful stuff! It's random who you get put through to (and I've been cut off and mis-routed on the phone many times now). It's like the same old postcode lottery. Why can't the cost per month follow the same principle as the level of service - sometimes 10% or less, and only 50% of the time at full price?

EDIT:
This being a 10Mb (L) customer for a while, and also being cut off more than five times in a MONTH, let alone over years. When it goes down the customer cannot even report it unless during office hours.

Until VM get an organisation-wide, higher-integrity ethic that extends to their worst-congested areas in practice, I think they should be avoided. It's just not fair to treat customers like that.

Edited by deleted (Tue 06-Jul-10 19:36:43)

I've had the 10mb package for 3 or more years now. I've very rarely had any problems with it. And speeds are pretty much exactly what Virgin say they will be
Upload speed of .5mb (currently) is a bit of a fly in the ointment though.. (Ok, correction "[censored] stingy")
And the day time download limits are somewhat easy to run into also. But if you keep the bulk of your downloads to overnight instead, then you'll rarely run into any traffic shaping.
10mb is fast enough for me, and it's been a good package so far. Nothing awful to say about it here.